Sure, if you’re an Ars reader, chances are that you have at least a basic understanding of how the Internet works. That is to say, of course, the computer you’re on right now talks to your ISP, which in turn talks to a central hub, which in turn connects to other networks, over fiber optic cables, and so forth. All in tiny fractions of seconds, all the way to its destination. You probably understand the basic principle of packet switching, that the route of data can change, and indeed, that this is its primary innovation.

But even the most geeky network engineers among us may not know that the very first original TCP/IP router, the “IMP,” was nearly tossed out of its original University of California, Los Angeles home. Or how oddly appropriate it was for an early porn site from the late 1990s, Danni.com [NSFW], to have a photo shoot at an important Internet exchange, called MAE-West. Or, who the current power couple of the North American Network Operators’ Group is.

Tubes explores not just the Internet’s history, but more importantly, its physicality, its infrastructure—trying to understand the question of why the Internet is laid out the way it is. The book easily belongs in the growing canon of essential books about Silicon Valley and the Internet as a whole, in the tradition of The Soul of a New Machine (1982), Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1998), The Victorian Internet (1998), Fire in the Valley (2000), and Who Controls the Internet? (2006).

I have to admit, when I first picked up Tubes, I was a bit skeptical that I would enjoy it. I’m not a network engineer, but I have poked my head inside of a data center, and I’ve looked at an undersea cable map before. I too am fascinated with what happens when sections of cable go down—as was the case on December 26, 2006 when an earthquake off of Taiwan knocked out seven of the nine major cables passing along the Luzon Strait, thus disabling 600 gigabits, and crippling Internet access in much of southeast Asia for weeks. Heck, my undergraduate thesis focused on the history of the Internet in Senegal, host to one of the landing stations for the SAT-3 cable that runs down the coast of West Africa.

Enlarge/ Andrew Blum has written for Wired, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, and many other publications.

Davina Pardo

But what I didn’t fully appreciate was what, as Blum writes, “happens here, in the Internet’s version of a city, deep in our version of the suburbs, where hundreds of networks have their offices (or cages) cheek by jowl.” He explores what the Internet actually looks like, calling cable-laying a “data center mille-feuille.”

Throughout the tome, Blum takes the reader on a historic and geographical lesson of both the Internet’s origins (in a humble room on the UCLA campus), but also to some of its networking hubs, including Palo Alto, Ashburn, London, Amsterdam, and their friendly rival down the continent in Frankfurt. The main point Blum drives home is that even in the digital world, geography continues to matter a lot to the Internet’s history and to its present operation—case in point, what’s apparently been called the “Chicago problem.”

“Two small competing Internet service providers in rural Minnesota might find themselves sending and receiving all their data to and from Chicago, by buying capacity on the paths of one of the big nationwide backbones, like Level 3 or Verizon,” Blum writes.

“But—as with a hub airport—the path of least resistance doesn't always make a lot of sense. In the simplest example, an e-mail from the first network to the second network across town would travel to Chicago and back. Visiting the University of Minnesota’s website, while sitting in Minneapolis, would entail a digital trip across state lines. But if you had a local Internet exchange, you could connect the two (or more) networks directly, often, for only the cost of the equipment. The thing is, that might not even be worth the effort given the low cost of getting traffic to Chicago, and the low volume of traffic between those two particular networks. Sometimes it is easier to fly through Atlanta. But if that local traffic were to increase—and it always does—there’s a point at which the elegance of interconnecting all of them, literally cutting Chicago out of the loop, is unmistakable.”

The last section of the book focuses on data centers, and the author makes a trip to Oregon, where Google, Facebook, and many others are expanding into what the local press has called “Silicon Forest.” Blum seems almost surprised that he doesn’t get very far into the belly of Google’s beast, where its data lives, where “the not-so-subliminal message was that I, and by extension you, can’t be trusted to understand what goes on inside its factory—the space in which we, ostensibly, have entrusted the company with our questions, letters, even ideas.”

Perhaps he’s not an Ars reader—we’ve identified numerousinstances where Google’s transparency on its privacy practices have been less than stellar. After all, not only is Google a private company that we all love to hate, but it’s a hugely profitable one, too. Still, Tubes is a great, playful, wondrous read—particularly for someone like me who self-identifies as a “wanderlust geek”—for those of us that aren’t network engineers.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar